Take, take, take your test: Part II

A few weeks ago, I posted the lyrics to a song called “Take, take, take your test,” sung to the tune of “Row, row, row your boat.” This ditty gives children tips for successful test-taking: “Go to bed and get some rest/Eat some good brain food.” The song, I wrote, had been given out to a public school child in kingergarten.

There was some skepticism that such a song was in the hands of a child so young, and I certainly understand such doubts. Are we really encouraging our youngest schoolchildren to prepare for tests, when they would be better off learning how to get along with others and how to build a tower out of blocks?

Anyway, I just got off the phone with Rita Hurault, a kindergarten teacher at the Tule Park Children’s Center in San Francisco, which provides aftercare for children from the public schools. One of her kindergarten students arrived at the aftercare center with the song lyrics in her backpack. She brought it from Garfield Elementary School, where she attends kindergarten. Says Hurault: “This is absolutely 100 percent true. I copied it word for word. On one side of the sheet was a totally innocuous song like ‘Garfield is the greatest school on earth,’ and on the other side was ‘Take, take, take your test.”’

Hurault has been teaching for 20 years, and when asked about the changes over two decades, she just sighs. “It’s been an interesting 20 years. The kids’ stress and anxiety levels: That’s the biggest change. And the expectation of what they can do academically has changed enormously.”

She says her main task at the center is to push back against the rigid academic environment in school and to “make space for the children to have time to dreamy-dream and think their own thoughts and connect with each other in a relaxed way.”

The children are with her for just a few hours a day, though, and Hurault is deeply concerned about the long-term repercussions of pushing academics down to early childhood classrooms. “We are headed in the wrong direction, and we are disserving our children in the worst way. It will be terrible in the years to come if human beings don’t have the time to think on their own. If children get stressed out at the age of five, it can’t bode well for grownup adults.”

As for the song, she copied it herself.  “I so wish it was a parody,” she tells me, with a sigh.